Wednesday, October 15, 2014

Fill Rates (Tradecraft)

Here's a little experiment. I'm taking my top 30 board games, which excludes expansions and card games, and checking availability from the largest three distributors at my local, West Coast warehouses. Over a quarter of this list includes Alliance exclusives (marked with an "x" for distributors that can't get those games), which pretty much guarantees I'll be shopping with Alliance. Lets look at the fill rates with these games, with Alliance being judged with their exclusives included. The other two distributors get a pass on those games.

Some of those games are now showing up more in mass market stores. I saw X-Wing, Pandemic, Ticket To Ride, Elder Sign, Net Runner all at my local Meijer which is a regional supermarket+department store.

I remember X-Wing Starter being an "exclusive" at Target for the holiday season like 2 years ago. Not sure how well it did for them as I saw them on 50% off clearance on multiple occasions. Buying 2 of those clearence starter boxes is how I got sucked into that game. Strangely they never stocked the boosters unlike say Barnes and Noble which for a while was the go to place for X-wing ships as my FLGS never had them in stock when I in. Subject: Re: New comment posted on Quest for Fun!: Fill Rates (Tradecraft)

One thing that numbers can't show is customer service. I have had piles of issues with Alliance just trying to get these base games. There sales people are.....lacking to say the least. ACD I have had a few issues, but they are so large I try not to deal with them. GTS? They have always been good on the customer service front (there shipping and warehouses have some issues). No distribuor is perfect.

This all boils down to a monopoly. Alliance doesn't have to try. They have a monopoly on a core group of popular games. And game companies flock to them to get an exclusive to save money on storage. Not knowing they have the worst customer service and distribution in the business. GTS is in 3rd. They are doing everyhing they can to be #1. And it shows. I have working with them off and on for 2 years. It hasnt all been great, but they are not the worst. What the game industry needs is more competition on the distributor front.

Yeah, this is not as clear as it might seem. Alliance gets a huge chunk of store business, GTS not as much. Therefore things may be in stock at GTS longer but their stock levels are lower. If I wanted 30 copies of game X (which is not an unusual occurrence) I might not be able to get that filled through a smaller distributor. That why many stores work through multiple distributors.

More distributors?? Not going to happen. The main reason for exclusives (from a publishers perspective) is publishers save lots of money shipping their games. If a company is exclusive through Alliance you have to drop ship to 4 or 5 warehouse vs 20+ if you are not just going through one distributor. Freight is not cheap. We receive shipments via freight quite often and it is expensive. We might have to pay $150 for a pallet of product. Imagine you are Days of Wonder and you just printed 100,000 copies of Ticket to Ride. How much more does that game cost you with non-exclusive distribution vs with just Alliance??

What we need is publishers to step in against the practices of distributors that end up resulting in lower sales. I heard a rumor that FFG had a 'meet your maker' meeting with the license holder for X-Wing about availability or lack thereof which was of course hurting their bottom line. Of course, this would require publishers to be able to have enough product to meet demand in the first place. Maybe we are not there yet. But the answer is NOT more distributors. That would dilute product availability more.